You're spot-on with Henry Ford.

Let us not forget that the social security system, with unemployment insurance and a state pension, was invented in the late 19th century by that well-known radical leftist, Prince Otto von Bismarck.

(He did it specifically to undermine the socialists, who he viewed as an internal security threat: it was the usual game of giving 90% of the supporters enough to buy them off and then rounding up the 10% radical fringe.)

The greatest hazard for our collective future is that the wealthiest section of our societies seem to have forgotten that there's an implicit social contract in consumer capitalism: mainly because many of them are engaged in financial manipulation with the goal of concentrating wealth, rather than actual primary production with the goal of creating wealth (like Henry Ford -- or, for that matter, Steve Jobs).

Once a capitalist society switches from producing and distributing wealth (so that everyone has an incentive to pitch in and work for it) to allowing the strong to grab as much as they can, the outlook for any kind of cooperation to produce long-term growth becomes bleak.

And why, you ask is the traditional retirement age 65? Bismark decided that too. Very few workers lived more than a year or two beyond 65, if they lived that long. It was a great sop, few collected, but everyone felt protected.

There are many, many third-world countries where the gap between the 1 and the 99% is much larger than it is in the Western world. Without wishing to be depressing, I see no obvious reason why our society couldn't slip into the same trap; it's been like that before!